-
Jeff Bezos flies beyond Karman Line aboard New Shepard space rocket
According to the We For News, Jeff Bezos was set to fly to the edge of space, beyond the Karman line, on Tuesday, along with three others, aboard his company Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket.
The Karman line, 100 km above the ground, is the internationally recognised boundary of space.
Along with Besides Jeff Bezos and his brother Mark, the 11-minute trip took the oldest person ever to go to space, 82-year-old trailblazing female aviator Wally Funk, and the youngest,an 18-year-old physics student Oliver Daemen, to an altitude of 100 km, where they experienced three to four minutes of weightlessness before returning to Earth in their space capsule.
They landed in the West Texas desert.
Bezos’ flight follows Richard Branson’s flight to the edge of space aboard his company Virgin Galactic’s VSS Unity on July 11.
Branson’s flight, however, did not go beyond the Karman line. It climbed nearly 86 km above the Earth’s surface.
Blue Origin said in a tweet “From the beginning, New Shepard was designed to fly above the Karman line, so none of our astronauts have an asterisk next to their name.”
The five-storey-tall New Shepard rocket, is named after the first American in space Alan Shepard.
It is designed to launch a crew capsule with seats for six roughly 340,000 feet into the sky toward the edge of space.
Jeff Bezos‘ flight is touted as the world’s first unpiloted suborbital flight.
Jeff Bezos chose July 20 as the launch date to honour the 52nd anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing.
levant
